The development of mining technology in Australia 1801-1945

Deposited with permission of the author. © 2005 Dr. Ralph Winter BirrellFrom a small beginning at Newcastle in 1801 when convicts began mining coal exposed on the banks of the Hunter River, the mining industry has grown to be a large sector of the Australian economy, providing an export income of A$58 billion in 2004 (almost forty percent of total exports) as well as providing the raw materials for local industries. The changing technologies used to develop this industry are an important part of our development as a nation, but few historians have written about them. This thesis offers an interpretive framework for visualising the mining industry as an historically coherent entity and for understanding the technological innovations in mining over 200 years. It focuses on the period to 1945. In the first fifty years coal and copper were mined in New South Wales and silver lead and copper in South Australia. Machines were introduced in the 1830s when a British joint stock company took over the coal mine and the use of machines increased in the 1840s when companies financed locally or from Britain began developing silver lead and copper mines. Technologies already developed in the north of England, Scotland, Germany, Cornwall, and Wales were imported and miners from England, Scotland, Germany and Cornwall and smeltermen from Wales migrated to Australia. British mining law was followed without question. This situation was revolutionised when Edward Hargraves, and his partners, found alluvial gold in commercial amounts at Ophir, 150 kilometres west of Sydney, in 1851. Hargraves had experience in alluvial mining in California and he embarked on a skilful publicity campaign to start a rush on the Californian pattern. His aim was to claim a reward from the government in return for boosting the economy and preventing the resumption of transportation of convicts to New South Wales. In terms of modern management theory his place in history is not the charlatan and fraud that some historians have suggested but an entrepreneur who changed the course of mining in Australia. Unwittingly or not he forced a change from a semi-feudal British legal system dominated by large companies, and enabled the emergence of a more democratic system which permitted both individual and company mining. In the confusion of the first rushes the government allowed the individual miner to peg a small claim on which he could dig for gold on payment of a licence fee. This small change led to many innovations in mining law and mining technology Australia. Following the ideas of Joel Mokyr and Roger Burt these innovations are assessed as micro-innovations (successive small changes) or as macro-innovations (radical new concepts without clear precedents); but I extend the latter concept to include several important micro-innovations that combined into what amounts to a singular new concept. Early macro-innovations were wet deep lead mining and the concept of the no-liability company and later ones were dry crushing, roasting, and cyanide filtering of sulpho-telluride gold ores and differential flotation of the complex sulphide ores of lead, zinc and copper